Cataloguing of the Suzanne Janin and Jean Peltier archive now complete

09/02/2015

Cataloguing of the Suzanne Janin and Jean Peltier archive now complete

Two years after the acquisition, the cataloguing of the archive of Suzanne Janin and Jean Peltier – two French artists who were active from 1930 to 1980 – is now complete. After studying at prestigious art schools in Paris, Susanne Janin and Jean Peltier started working with Ducharne, a very important French designer and maker, and in the 1930s they created their own studio. The two artists, who received important awards from the art world with solo exhibitions at major museums in Paris and the United States, worked for big names in fashion, including Elsa Schiaparelli, and for the best-known international textile companies. They had different, but equally elegant and creative styles that epitomized the freedom of those years. The Archive includes several samples of patterned and printed fabrics – often with the respective color combinations – and some 15,000 designs on paper. The archive is historically important also because it highlights interesting correlations among fabrics, designs and handwritten annotations of the two artists, and it contains many pictures of dresses made from fabrics designed the couple and published in the magazines of the period. This is a very important acquisition that differs from the existing Ratti archives in terms of both content and style. In “Memoirs of Hadrian” Marguerite Yourcenar wrote: “Take the past into the future”. You take a look at one of the archive designs and mentally you move its borders, change the position of a flower, touch its material and shapes, think of a new color scheme, grasp the irresistible charm emanating from it and reinvent it. You eyes find inspiration, changes the pace and the power of a motif. Transforming past into present is a magical and mysterious shift. In the Sixties, Antonio Ratti began collecting antique textiles – source of inspiration for the designers and stylists who were among the customers of his company. The collection of ancient fabrics is now held at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, while the designs produced by the company since 1945, alongside those of Abraham made for Yves Saint Laurent, of Ravasi, Braghenti, Campi, Rainbow Bernard Nevill and Cantoni, are held in Guanzate and are accessible to the public. In 2001, the company acquired the beautiful French Bianchini et Ferrier archive and the amazing archive of Fede Cheti who had invited world famous artists like Gio Ponti, Raymond Peynet, Raoul Dufy, Giorgio De Chirico and Filippo De Pisis to design home décor fabrics. In 2011, the company acquired the Gandini Tessuti Alta Moda archive. Today, the archives kept at the Ratti headquarters and spanning over 100 years of history, include more than 400,000 fabrics, displayed on open shelves and arranged by genre so that you can capture their essence, modify it and adapt it to the present day and transform past into present.